Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil | Lex Fridman Podcast #357

Narcissism is not arrogance. Narcissism is the opposite of arrogance. There is such a deep sense of inadequacy and incompetence in the self that the defensive structure around that becomes dominated by rocket fueled envy.

The following is a conversation with Paul Conti, a psychiatrist and and a brilliant scholar of human nature. My friend Andrew Huberman told me that Paul and I absolutely must meet and talk. Not just about the topic of trauma, which Paul wrote an amazing book about, but broadly about human nature, about narcissism, sociopathy, psychopathy, good and evil, hate and love, happiness and envy. As usual, Andrew was right. This was a fascinating conversation. As the old meme goes, one does not simply doubt the advice of Andrew Huberman. Allow me to also quickly mention that I disagree with Paul a bunch in this episode, as I do in other episodes, even with experts, in part for fun and in part because I think the tension of ideas in conversation is what creates insights and wisdom. My goal is to always empathize, understand and explore ideas of the person sitting across from me. This agreement is just one of the ways I think it's fun to do just that as long as I do so from a place of curiosity and compassion. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Paul Conti. Do you see psychiatry as fundamentally a study of the human mind and not just a set of tools for treating psychological maladies?

Absolutely. I think psychiatry is our best way to understand who we are as people. I mean, it looks at our biology, how does our brain work, how does it connect the parts with one another, how does the chemistry and at work, it's the very foundational aspects of who we are. And then it manifests as psychology. What do we think? What do we feel? What are our strivings? What are our fears? So, yeah, I think psychiatry provides tools that we can use to help each other, but those tools come through it being a discipline of understanding.

So with every patient you see, with every mind you explore, are you picking up a deeper understanding of the human mind?

I think I'm trying to. I think we should learn, should be able to take something away from everything we do, every interaction to some small degree, every conversation.

It doesn't have to be a patient just anywhere at Starbucks getting a coffee. You can learn something from that little experience.

Yeah, even if you just reinforce gentle kindness and gratitude and decent human interaction, there's a reinforcement of that. That even if we don't take away memories or Lessons, so to speak, we can reinforce who we choose to be.

So understanding ourselves from those interactions too, not just the general sort of philosophical human mind, but understanding our own mind. Introspect on how our own mind works.

Yeah, because everything we understand about anyone or anything else is coming through here. Right. So, yeah, we're understanding others. We're also understanding ourselves. It's all feeding through us.

Yeah, yeah. But it's a tricky thing to step away and look at your own mind and understand that it's just a machine. You can kind of control the way the machine processes the external environment and the way that machine converts the things it perceives into actual emotions, like how it interprets the things it perceives. You just sort of step away and analyze it in that way, and then you can control it. You, you can oil the machine. You can control how it actually interprets the perceptions in order to generate positive emotions and be like, what is it like, a mechanic for the gears in the machine?

I mean, I think to some degree, to some degree of it, the difference, I think, at least as I understand, I think of machines as not being inscrutable, right. That if there's enough study, there's enough acumen applied that we can understand whatever it is we're trying to figure out. Whereas part of understanding ourselves is understanding that there are things we can't understand. And I think that's indispensably important to health and happiness and also to having enough humility to see how people can be different from us, how we can be different from ourselves at times. So knowing that we don't know a lot and having some idea of what that might be, I think is an indispensable part of the process, which I think is different from machines. I think.

Yeah, the machines. You're basically saying machines generally, because they're engineered from a design, they're usually going to be simpler, therefore understandable. And you're saying the complexity of the human mind is, at least from our perspective, nearly infinite.

Is there metaphenomena, what sometimes gets described as sort of levels of emergence, where at increasing levels of complexity, complexity, you have novelty evolve that you can't predict from lower levels of complexity, like, for example, atoms to molecules, it's just one example, I think neurons to consciousness, consciousness to culture. There are metaphenomena that separate from the phenomena underneath of them and thereby add an entire aspect of novelty. So I think we are, I mean, I really think this is true, that we are all infinitely fascinating because these levels of emergence of novelty that Are inscrutable because you can't predict from one level to the next or understand fully are what make us. And not just us, but I think sentient creatures. Right. Human beings. But sentient creatures inestimably more interesting than creatures that aren't sentient. And I don't know, I think when. When we think about machine learning and artificial intelligence, I think it's that. That we're trying to create levels of emergence that now we don't fully understand anymore. Which I guess is both exciting and maybe scary, too.

Yeah. So you start at the physics of atoms. Quantum mechanics, Go into chemistry, go into biology. From the biology, you have the functional phenomena, Especially as manifested in the human brain. And then multiple brains connecting together through consciousness and intelligence creates civilizations. It's pretty interesting. Where do you think the magic is at? Which layer of the cake?

Every layer. Because every time you emerge from one thing to another, I see it as an analog, like the concept of the dialectic.

Right.

Where I think it was Hegel who realized, hey, when you have thing A and thing B, and they're complicated and they come together, you know, you don't get a hybrid of A and B.

Right.

You know, you end up getting something that's new, that's novel. And I think that describes to some degree that, like, what emergence is, except there's a whole new universe of novelty, right. That comes at each layer of emergence that allows infinite possibilities that weren't possible before. And I think that's why we're so complicated, that we're. Our functional neuroscience, which I think is psychology. Right. Our ability to think about ourselves, about others, to be reflective, is sitting on top of so many layers of emergence. Like the idea of standing on the shoulders of giants that we're, you know, each of us, our consciousness is standing on the shoulder of a giant of many, many, many levels of emergence of novelty. So many of which we don't understand. I mean, about subatomic particles, everything that quantum physics means, you know, when. When does time, as opposed to things happening outside of time and outside of space, when do we slot into one temporal perspective? And then the complexity just, I think, grows and grows and grows.

Yeah. The interesting word you use is novelty. If true, this really blows my mind in some, either shallow or deep sense, it is true. I'm trying to figure that out. I don't know if you know something about cellular automata. It's this very simple mathematical objects where you have rules that govern each individual little cell and they interact locally and that you understand the very simple operation of those individual cells, but add another layer of abstraction. When you just kind of zoom out with blurry vision, these meta objects starts appearing. That function. You could build a Turing machine with it. You can build an arbitrary complexity of computation on top of this kind of very simple object.

Yes.

It's an interesting question whether that was always there. The atoms somehow know about love, right? Like about consciousness, about war and violence and evil and hate and all that. That's already laden in the possibility of that, the capacity for that. It's already in the atoms, it's already in the physics, it's already in the, in, in all the different chemistry. And that builds up and it's like even the origin of life still a mystery. That's, that's known. That's in the physics that's known to the universe, the basic background physics in the universe. I don't. Because if that's not the case, it's like, where does that come from? Where's that magic? And how many layers can the cake possibly have? How many are we going to keep building if it's all. If there's. If we're constantly through this process of abstraction, of adding a layer to the cake, adding novel things like where's the ceiling? As we expand out into the cosmos, if we successfully can do that, are we going to keep building more miraculous, complex objects? And then the brain is just like a middle layer thing. We tend to think of ourselves as truly, truly special manifestations of what's possible in the universe. But maybe we're just like the basic, like tiny building block of something much, much, much bigger. We're in the early days of being a brick and a very large building.

Sure, I think that's entirely possible. I mean, I think the only emergent thing, so to speak, that we build is culture, right? The aggregation of us. So you have individual human minds which are entirely unique. Even the fact that time is different for you and me, right? It may be by picoseconds, right? But we can engage because our perceptions of time are parallel enough, they're close enough that we can share a reality. But we're all living in a different dimension of time. I mean, we know that, so we're unique in that way. And then the unique individuals that we are, just like the cells, start to create not just one thing, not just a culture, but culture on top of our individuality, right? Our uniqueness, our even dimensional uniqueness of time and experience and consciousness. So we create cultures on top of us. But what could be beyond culture, right? And what Is different from us either on underlying levels like, you know, like quantum physics or chemistry or biology or ent. Different and unconceived, I think is. It's an immense question and I think it's one that should create humility in us, right? That look, look how much we don't know and then how reckless we are with ourselves, with our resources, with human life. And I think there, it's important to say, think about how entropy rules the universe around us. How over selected are we? How many, not just hundreds or thousands of times, but how many millions of times does there have to be a selection branch point before we get into a sort of eddy pool of counter entropy where you can begin to create? Which I think is why you say, okay, do the atoms know about love, right? The fact that anything is being created means there's this over selection for counter entropy, where there can be a building of greater complexity, of ultimately of novelty. And we don't often think about that, of how far removed we are, maybe light years, so to speak, from any other location temporally, physically in the universe where this could happen. And we don't think about what does.

That mean everything, like you said, love, everything is counter entropy goes against the way the basic physics of the universe. So maybe actually the atoms really don't like what we're doing. They want us to stop. They've been trying really hard to stop. And despite that, we somehow started this whole bacteria thing for like a billion years and now we're here.

I actually think of it kind of the other way. I don't think there's any purpose to purposelessness, right? So why would anything be here if the drive weren't towards creativity, if the drive weren't towards those subatomic particles not being nothingness that blips in and out of existence like we think is going on in empty space for light years upon light years. But is there a design, either natural or intentional, for a schema, a scenario that allows for the incredibly rare but not non existent eddy pool of counter entropy? Where good can happen, right? Where creativity can happen, where ultimately something can grow, something novel can happen. There's no novelty in the vastness of space, even though there's not nothing there. There's novelty here because I think the, the layers of, of emergence start stacking very, very, very high when we're in a place of counter entropy and which then could provide even thoughts about good and evil, right? The idea that creating, that preserving is good. It's what we build upon, it's how we get to the eddy pool of counter entropy. So then destruction is not good. What good comes of aggression and destruction? Unless we're protecting or even you can think of outlying cases. But just think in general concepts, right? Destruction destroys. It brings us towards a state of entropy, towards a state of nothingness. Whereas goodness, commonality, collaboration, nurturing brings novelty, it brings new existence into the universe. And I think we don't think about that. We're in the middle of something so vast and built on top of so many layers. And I think it leads us to be cavalier with human life, including often our own.

So you think this, there's an underlying creative force of the universe that might even have a kind of built in morality to it, where creating is better than destroying. And then that somehow maps on onto our society where we kind of try to figure out what that actually means in terms of good and evil. So there, that's some something is there like that. But it's like, but it has to be. It's like so nice, it's so perfect because it's rare, it's sufficiently rare where we have our own space. Like you can close the door and say, I need to be alone right now as our human civilization to work on my thing. So it's sufficiently rare that there's not other alien civilizations. They're just like constantly knocking on our door, destroying us, but it still exists. That's weird, right? Right.

It's so fantastically improbable that I think we should be very respectful of it. And I think you said there's a creative force that values creativity. Things would be. Well, sure, if it's a creative force. Right. Its ability to exist and to create comes from something other than entropy. Right. Something other than so much dispersion that there's nothingness. Right. So the creative force will value the sanctity of things. Right. Keeping things together, not destroying things. Right. Building novelty, including novelty of knowledge, novelty of sentience. I mean it fits with the idea that we're not nothing, that that's incredibly improbable and that there are these many, many layers of emergence that we're standing upon. And I think it tells us something that we're not doing ourselves a service to ignore. Right. It's not just a jump to saying oh, there's a religious answer to everything, it's just no, it's saying science isn't a God either. Right. So if we think of science as a tool and not as an endpoint in and of itself, what is the science telling us? I remember showing up at medical school. And it really is true. I mean, I knew so little about the human body. I'd only been in hospitals to visit people. I'd taken pre med classes, but sort of intensely at once. After I didn't take any and I was working in business, I knew next to nothing. And I had this idea that was so naive in retrospect, that I was going to learn so much, right? I was going to answer these questions because I was going to learn what's going on in the body, what are these organs doing? What are these cells? And what I learned was.

There was.

So much more that was amazing and mysterious and seemingly impossible. Like even how a cell functions, what is going on inside of a cell? The transport mechanisms and energy functions and diffusion functions. And then you can go down to smaller levels than that. But when you come back out and you say how, how all those cells make a kidney, it's not explanatory. I remember asking the OB who had delivered my first child, I was so amazed. And I asked him, like, what do you think? What do you know? You do this right, you're seeing this life created. And his thought was nothing. I just marvel. I mean, I get to do this, but I just marvel at it. And I think the more we know about us, the more we respectfully marvel.

And we should do that. We should proactively marvel at every aspect, at every layer where the novelty emerges.

Yes, we'd be a lot less likely to say, hey, I don't like you because of something, whatever it is, you know, race, religion, culture, sexuality, gender identity, whatever it is, you know, Or I want to say, I want rights that you don't have. Right? Or I want what you have. I mean, there's so much of this, and I understand it's driven by scarcity and by human insecurity and envy and all of these things that I think drive us towards destruction. But all of that recklessness comes from not having this initial appreciation and respect that you're referring to and just marveling at like, wow, okay, we're here. That's amazing. Let's start with that.

But if we marvel at this whole thing, the human project, the human condition, all the different kinds of human beings that are possible, what do you then make of that? Some humans do evil onto the world? First of all, are all human beings capable of evil? If we're in the process now, we've got a little bit of momentum in terms of marveling at the layers of the cake. Should we also marvel at the capacity for evil? In all of us. Is that capacity there?

I believe that it is, yes.

So what do I understand about the psychology of evil? Where does that originate in the human mind? Is it there in the neurobiology? Is it there in the environment, in the upbringing?

Can I clarify first? I think the capacity for evil, I do believe is in all of us. There's a difference between enacting evil and a sort of preset followed developed plan of evil. I don't believe that all of us are capable of doing what the people who perpetrate the most evil do.

Right.

But I do believe that we're capable of perpetrating evil.

Right.

And one thought would be that there are drives in us. I mean, there certainly seem to be drives in us towards survival, towards gratification in some ways, towards pleasure. And that can get very complicated because pleasure inside can be relief of distress. So if I feel very badly about myself and I can feel a little better about myself by making you feel worse about yourself, which that plays out in a lot of human beings, is that an indirect way of bringing pleasure? So it gets very complicated what's going on inside of us. And sometimes the perpetration of evil things can be through misunderstandings, anger, impulsivity. I mean, there are things that we can have in us and other times there can be other things going on which are through the lens of unhealthy human psychology. So for example, the psychology of envy, which I think drives the lion's share of the orchestrated evil.

Right.

There's a difference between impulsive, reflexive evil and highly orchestrated evil, which I think is driven by envy.

Highly orchestrated evil. Are we talking about a scale of societies like totalitarianism? So if, if we're thinking about somebody like Hitler, so at scale orchestration of evil, envy driving that. So I mean, that's really interesting to think about. I'd love to hear more about it. So some of it, there might be some psychological forces that are in tension with each other. So one is, if you look at somebody like Hitler, it's difficult to know what was going on in his mind. But it's possible to imagine if you just look at dictators throughout history, that he thought he was doing good not just for himself, but for the people he believed have value. So one way you can have, you can achieve what we consider as evil is by devaluing some group of people. And that could be all group of people. So it could be, have sort of a narcissistic type of idea that you basically don't care about other human Beings. That's one. Envy is different. I mean, maybe they can collaborate together or even, like you mentioned, you can actually enjoy doing bad to others. That's almost like, different. Because if all it is is like narcissism, you disregard, you don't care what. How others feel, then you can just make cold, calculated, military, almost economic decisions, and you don't care if a million people die here or there. But if you actually enjoy some aspect of that or there is like a resentment that fuels it. It's not just cold calculation. It's like fueled by some kind of personal or cultural resentment. I think it's all fueled by that. You think so?

I think it's all fueled by that. I think the idea that, say, Hitler thought he was doing good, right. Is like, that is such a thin facade that it flies away like a handkerchief in a hurricane. Right?

Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Wow, that's beautiful.

Yeah. It's built upon. It says, I'll explain logical lies, Right? Because people can build lies upon specious logic, right? So the idea that, okay, I am doing good because I believe that this ethnicity of people is good and this is bad, and now I'm going to do this and I'm going to make the world different and it's going to bring better to the world. And now I'm raising armies and I'm building concentration camps. And I think, like, this is all in the service of good. Is. I don't think anyone ever thinks that, right? Or they. They think that, but with. Because they're living in the surface patina, right? Like, they're not allowing the hurricane in that blows away the handkerchief and says, like, this is all. This is all. This is all evil, right? I mean, how do you decide that some group of people is good and some is bad? And like, what is it that you take upon yourself to play God or make decisions about the world? And I think what really is going on is people are not doing that, right? There's something cobbled together to say, like, why this is right and this is okay, right? And this is even good, right? But it is all a lie, right? It's a lie that's adorning what I believe is the fact. I believe that what's going on is the gratification of envy inside of the person. And whether someone says, oh, I think this is good and it's okay if a million people die or I'm going to enjoy that a million people die, I think is the same. I think the enjoyment, the gratification of the orchestrated evil Is there? And that. It all comes from vulnerability and insecurity. It all comes from deficits in the sense of self.

Right. I'm gonna have to process that. My slow penny and PC is processing that. So envy underlies all of it. The psychological concept of envy, what is that? I keep putting myself in the mind of Hitler. I guess that has nothing to do. It doesn't have to do with Jews or Slavic people. Does it have to do with specific amorphous other in his mind that he's envious of?

I think it has all to do with him. All to do with him. There's not a love of the people with whom he allied or even a sense that the people who he persecuted were worse than him. It's all projections out of what was going on inside of him, which was an intense sense of inadequacy, a rage at being someone he perceived as lesser than. That's the difference between. So we can define words in different ways, even within psychology, but let's say we take the definition here of sort of jealousy as being sort of benign, right? The idea that, oh, I might see something that you have that I don't, and I might think, I'd like that, maybe I'll work harder to get it right. Or maybe I can't get it. Maybe it's that you're younger than I am. They say, okay, you know, okay, you know, you have that and I don't. I mean, I have other things too. I'm okay anyway. But I might want those things. But it's very benign, the jealousy. I'd like to be younger. I'd like to be richer, whatever it is that we people think. Right? But it's just a thought. And it's a thought that can result in strivings or acceptance, right? It's very, very different. It's completely different than envy, which is destructive. It's the thought of, I see something that you have that I don't have.

Right?

And instead of me working for it or accepting that I don't have it, what I like to do then is bring you down, take you down to where I am, and then I'll feel better, right? Because from the perspective of envy, it is all relative.

So is jealousy a kind of. Because he said completely different. But is jealousy potentially like a gateway drug to envy? Like, does it. Does it. Like, is it a slippery slope?

I think no. I think that jealousy is a natural, just part of the human phenomenon that we go through life and we see. Like, oh, I'd like to have That I think it's part of our incentives, right? If, you know, if I'm farming and I have one row of crops and I look over and I see that you're working harder and you have two, and I'd like to have two that can make me work harder to have two.

You don't think it's a slippery slope from one to the other to. At first you're like, I'd like to work harder. But then you keep failing and the weather sucks and you keep failing and the other person becomes more successful. Plus he's got a new hot wife now there's a nice tractor. Does it feel this all working? And then you get this idea that, you know what, I'm going to steal all his stuff and gonna murder him and that. Don't you think that's just like a leap? No, I actually think the same phenomenon.

No, no. Because I think there are things that are in us as humans, right? So the things that just by being human, like we can, for example, feel. We can feel compassion, right? We can feel interest, right? We can feel jealousy in that benign sense. Like it's all part of just being human. If we start going from, hey, you have more crops than I have, and I seems like actually have a better life in a lot of ways than I have, I'm going to kill you. That is not a progression of something benign, right? That is.

But wait, wait a minute. But that is a human leap of the same thing, isn't it? Because you're drawing a line, you're saying like, this is this human stuff, it's regular life, it's benign. But it feels like this benign thing is just a low magnitude thing, version of the thing that's not benign. Like there's probably a gray area where it stops being. But like jealousy, you can have like healthy jealousy, you can have a little bit slightly unhealthy. There's a. That's, I think, jealous guy. This John Lennon song that I love is just beautiful. I mean, there's like this jealousy inside relationships can make you feel like, you know, could take your minds in all kinds of silly directions. And it's crazy, but like it feels like that, that's a next door neighbor to like being really crazy and toxic and all that kind of stuff inside relationships. And then that feels like a next door neighbor. It's like an apartment building that feels like a next door neighbor that eventually gets to Hitler with envy and resentment of an entire population of people.

You're right. There's a causal. There can Be a causal chain, right. Like, if I'm not feeling jealous, maybe I won't ever feel envious. Right. So you can see. Okay. So it can kind of lead to. Can open gates to. Huh. Like, how much do I dislike that you have things that I don't have? Right. So, yes, in that sense.

But.

And I think this is the part I think is so important that I think there is a disjunction.

Right. It's.

There's an asymptotic shift, right. From one thing to another.

Because now you're speaking my language mathematically.

Yeah. Yes. That's. It's a way to convey. Right. Something that's entirely different. Because if I start thinking, you know, I'm not going to try and make things better. Right. I'd like instead to harm you. That's. That's qualitatively different.

Oh, it's almost like, you know what it is. It could be. I don't know what you think about this, but it's in which direction your motivation is pointing. So if in the response to the feeling of jealousy, your sort of. The motivation says, okay, I understand this feeling. I want to do less of it. I think there must be a threshold to which you actually want to do more of it. Like, it becomes a vicious downward cycle. So that's what envy becomes. Like, the first feeling, this idea that I'm going to kill the farmer turns into like more and more and more and you can't sleep and you're visualizing the farmer and it becomes the devil. And like, you have this very, you know, it's basically a thing that builds into the negative direction versus returns to the stable center.

Now a person is cultivating evil. They're saying, hey, there can be seeds of evil in all of us. Let me take that seed out, dust it off, plant it, nurture it, and then grow that seed of evil which will affect all other parts of the person's life. Right? They won't behave the same towards others in their life. They'll become different as they nurture fantasies of evil, as they begin to create with inside of themselves the motivation and the will. Right. To enact evil. The Hitler analogy would say, look, you take someone who had a bad childhood, right? Who was not loved, who was taught and told that he was less than okay. Like that. We know that happens. I mean, that's why child abuse is so evil, right? It's telling children the worst possible wrong lessons. Right? They're not good enough. They'll always be hurt. They can't keep themselves safe. They don't deserve safety. Right? So then you take someone who then nurtures that seed of evil, which is a choice, and says, well, I can't paint well enough and no one appreciates me and I don't like how I look and I don't fit in with the people I want to fit in with. And then and on and on and on and on and on. And there's a hatred of self through that lens of misery, of just being repulsed by the self, but that's unacceptable to the self. So, oh, it has to be someone else's fault, Right? It's not my fault. Whose fault is it? Right? And then you see en masse the inaction of evil towards groups of people who somehow in this person's mind are responsible for his misery. And there's the justification of evil. And then all the, you know, whether it's, this will be better for the economy, this will be good, this will be that. Like that's all lies built to justify the evil.

Those are surface level narratives. Yes. And the envy is the deep down mechanism that enables.

And that's the end point that's being served. What's being served is destruction, which is why it always brings more destruction. How many times do wars that were started for purposes that we would look and say those were evil purposes? How many times does good come of that? Even if we look at the modern world, what comes of it is more evil, is more destruction. Hitler's outward destruction eventually came inward. And you see pictures of what Berlin looked like after the Second World War. It wasn't just destruction perpetrated outward. As awful as that is, it's catchy. People used to worry during the time of the Manhattan Project, if you start this chain reaction, will you blow the whole world up or will it stop within this bomb or not? And we see, okay, the chain reaction of evil hasn't yet blown the whole world up. But look at how the catastrophe spreads. You think 50 to 60 million people dead in the Second World War truly was a world war. What destruction was spread around the globe.

And this is something that can't be stopped. Once the chain reaction starts. Like if Hitler was successful, it would just keep going.

If he had been, think about on.

His personal psychological level, I mean, right.

Because we think from the perspective of destruction, success would have needed led to the need to conquer more. Then there's factions and infighting, and then eventually you get the same mass destruction. Right? And never does the inaction of evil satisfy what the person is initially seeking. Like people want to Feel better about themselves. Right. Winnicott, who was a British pediatrician who wrote about children and adults from very deep perspectives. He wrote about the idea of good enough. Right? And you can sort of extrapolate that to like, we all want to feel good enough. Like, not just limp over the line good enough, but I want to feel good enough that I'm a decent person in the world and like what I do matters. And, you know, I can have an impact on people and, you know, people can like me and care about me. There's a simplicity there that people want that when people don't have. And there's certain other factors, maybe their temperamental factors or historical factors can lead to. To trying to soothe that deficit right through envy. And I think it starts with that. And it often starts in childhood. Not always, but it often starts in childhood when the child's brain and psychology are so vulnerable and you see salient child abuse. If you look at what was Hitler's background and what was Stalin's background, I mean, you could look at almost anyone who's perpetrated evil. They're serial killers. Whatever it may be. The majority, not everyone, but the majority had these lessons in childhood that said, you're not good enough, you can't keep yourself safe, no one cares about you. And in a subset of people, that's going to generate envy. That seed of evil then gets planted and nurtured as a fighter jet roars above us.

The sound of a fighter jet above us, been good. By orchestrating that thing, you forget, you quickly forget the comfort of being in a peaceful place. That's one thing I saw in Ukraine, is, hey, you quickly get comfortable here. The whole trip back, I was thinking, it's so damn good to be in America. The whole, just the whole like, it's like a three day trip back. It's so good to be American.

We might take that for granted as a population, but I do agree.

So the destruction never alleviates the envy. Are all humans capable of envy?

I believe the answer is yes. If you think, do we all have the possibility of evil in us? I think the answer to that is yes. But we have free will, we have choice. We can choose what we do with that. Which is why just because someone is a sociopath, for example, doesn't mean that they're not responsible. Our medical legal jurisprudence has absolutely borne that out. That legally, medically we think, okay, we're responsible, presuming we're not unhealthy in other ways, that eliminates our ability to be circumspect but that we're responsible for what we do and don't nurture inside of us. I mean, there are plenty of things we could decide to nurture anger and hatred about. I could think of slights, difficulties. Whether it's something someone else has done to me, or I could blame fate, or I could be mad at God or the world. We can all make those choices and we're responsible for them or for recognizing things in us. Like, oh, I too have that in me, but I don't want to nurture that. I don't want to foster that. Or do I choose to nurture and foster that? And I think ultimately our subject of Hitler as evil, if Hitler had kept winning and winning, I think ultimately he would have been the only person on earth. And I really do believe that ultimately everyone, everything else would be killed because it's such destruction, right? Destroy everything. And probably when that didn't work, then there's the destruction of the self, right? Because nothing soothes envy that is stoked by the sort of flames of evil. And what you see is more and more anger and more and more frustration. Which is why I really do believe someone like that, who nurtured evil in themselves that way ultimately would destroy. They'd be like him and one other person, then he'd kill the other person.

I think that's really powerfully said. But even just to return to the jealousy versus envy, I still think that it's the same flame and envy is just the bigger version of it. So I think I just. In my own personal life, I've felt jealousy towards others, like you said, like, oh, this person has a. I don't know, a cooler thing. Trinket, whatever trinket I cared about. And usually it's when somebody's really close to the trinket you're building. And I, early on, like, in my teens, I realized that just empirically speaking, that jealousy over a period of a week just doesn't feel good and it's not productive. It doesn't help me build a better trinket. Or it does. If I turn it not into jealousy towards another person, but into a love for building a better trinket. It's like, oh, cool almost. You know what? Like, proactively speaking and later in life, like, people like Joe Rogan actually have been really powerful in this for me, just as a fan of his, to celebrate other people. So it's almost as opposed to ignoring that other person with a cool trinket. It's like celebrating their awesomeness in My mind, like, just saying how awesome that humans are able to do that. And actually just how awesome is that exact person at being able to do that? And that somehow made me more capable to build my own trinket better.

Yes.

And it feels good also, like, it makes me feel happy.

And now you're not jealous anymore.

You're not jealous anymore, Right.

That's why I think jealousy is different, right? Because you're saying there's a week of jealousy. Like, I don't like this. Right? I don't like. But if you take that in a way that says, wait a second, actually, this is awesome, this is fabulous, and this person did this, that person's awesome, right? Then. Then you're not raining on anyone's parade. And in not doing that, even inside your own mind, you gain a greater cognizance of your own capability. Well, if he can do that or she can do that, why can't I, too? I want to make the better trinket too. Right now you're thinking creatively. Nowhere in there was the emergence of evil.

I just disagree with that. I think there was a choice made where I looked at my. If my life was darker, more difficult. I think it has nothing to do with the actual little flame of jealousy I felt. I think it has to do a lot more with the other context. If my life were more difficult, there was more abuse, there was more challenges. I think that decision. I could have made that decision a different direction, maybe. I don't know. You've written brilliantly about trauma. If there's a bit more trauma as the background noise of my decision making, I'll be more likely to not be able to pull away from the gravitational field of that jealousy. And it would build and build and build and build. So I think, not to disagree with a brilliant person, but I feel like that flame, that flame has the capacity to engulf the whole world. I guess the initial flame of jealousy, the little bit like, especially the younger you are, it's almost like a habit you get to build in either direction. Because I've early on built a habit of saying, I'm going to channel that jealousy into productivity and into celebrating other people. And that jealousy disappears. That was like a little discovery for me. I discovered that. I get it. That doesn't come. Nobody tells that to you. You kind of discover that little thing. I could have easily not discovered it. I could have easily discovered that it kind of feels good to. To, like, mess with that other person, to, like, think shitty thoughts, think negative thoughts, do negative things, to the other person. Because that could also. I just think the capacity in that initial feeling is there. And I think it's a decision we make because otherwise I think it dissolves responsibility. Like, well, surely I'm not Hitler, therefore this jealousy is normal. No, I just feel like every jealousy has the capacity to turn into maybe not Hitler, but a toxicity that destroys in a small way in your own little private life. But it could destroy.

I agree. That jealousy brings us. Can bring us dangerously close to envy. I mean, maybe. Let's see if a heuristic we could agree on, right?

Let's see.

So let's say, okay, if we look at the terrain of the mind as geography, right? So if I'm feeling happy, satisfied, proud, like I'm pretty far from envy land, right? But if I'm feeling jealousy now, I'm coming kind of closer to that border, right? And I still. I think there's. It's a big thing to go over the border, right? That the border isn't a gray area, right? There's a border to go over. And I think that you. I agree completely. One, certainly about trauma, that the more trauma there is because then the more misunderstandings there are about self and feelings that I'm not good enough, and then that can be anger about why and who might be oppressing me. And, you know, I hate myself and everyone else who seems to be better. Like, so the trauma can drive us in these negative directions, but we're still crossing over something, right? So if you have the trinket, and I think that's awesome. I want that. I want to work harder. You know what I could do, though, is I could sneak in tonight when no one's around and I could move something. No, no, wait. I don't want to do that, right? But it's like I came over the border a little bit, and I thought maybe. Maybe that's a better way. But then I came back, right? And we're responsible for that, right? Because it is a choice to say, I don't want to work hard. I'm already working how hard? I don't want to make my trinket better. I want to think mine's the best one. I could destroy yours, right? Then we're letting our mind go over that border. And do we say, run that forward? Let's run that forward and put people around us who feel the same way and start doing it so we think less of ourselves and we debase ourselves. Do we run headlong in or do we come over that boundary and that's Maybe the capacity for evil in us, that we come over that boundary, all of us at times, but do we come over it and then say no, that's not my choice, that's not my self definition. I'm coming back.

But I'm trying to justify maybe there are certain other sociological forces that help us cross the border too. So in Nazi Germany we've been talking about Hitler, but then there's also the German people. And so maybe when there's a bit of a mass hysteria, so all these effects of like combination of propaganda with the small jealousies and resentments of the people that don't cross the border, together they can with great charismatic leaders that sort of really fuel that fire that we feel when we're part of the crowd. So maybe those individual kind of psychological barriers, we have to take that leap from jealousy to envy, those can be made easier. The leap can be catalyzed through this massive 100%, 100%.

I think that to me is a massive point. We're talking about layers of emergence, right? So if there's individual consciousness, then there's culture and we're products of the soup we swim in, so to speak. People would say that when I was growing up, we're products of the soup we swim in. So if the soup that we're swimming in is the soup of hatred, then it's going to foster all of those things. So then you think about just in a painting with a very broad brush, the culture created in Germany prior to the Second World War. And what was the impact of the reparations after the First World War of the punishing reparations, impoverishment and basically humiliation that people were feeling? Okay, that's. There were a whole bunch of decisions that impacted that cultural perspective. Right? Then there must have been aspects, just like I see in many ways parallels in America now of what are our standards for what we're communicating to others, right? How is the media deciding like what's real and what's not real, what's true, what's not true, what's hatred? That is only going to do evil versus what's hatred. That's okay, because I might sell something by putting it out there. I mean that was, we know that was going on in Germany during the rise of the Nazis. And I think there's a parallel to do we value truth? Can we stand together and say, no matter how much I might disagree with you politically, right. We can still understand that there's right and there's wrong, right? There's truth and there's lies. Right? So I think those are just two examples of determinants of culture. And then the culture is a determinant of, you know, is someone like Hitler marginalized is like, that's a, that's a crazy evil person. Oh my goodness. Like, whoa. Right? Or is that someone who gains a greater following and more adherence and then there starts to be a momentum? Because why? Because what the demagogues do, I think they have a giant lasso and they harness the envy of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people. That's right. You feel worse about yourself too. Doesn't matter what the reasons are. Maybe it's your childhood, maybe it's not. Maybe it's job failings, maybe it's professional, maybe it's personal. It doesn't matter. You have envy too. Let's put it together and do some destruction because that'll make us feel better, which is a lie.

So we've talked about envy. Where does from the leader perspective, things like narcissism or sociopathy, psychopathy come into play? What can you make of the world we live in? Maybe the leaders that run the world from the perspective from the lens of narcissism.

So I am struck 20 years of doing what I do now. I've been a psychiatrist for 20 years and I practice in so many different settings and I consult in different settings. I've been fortunate to have a very wide purview of what's going on in people and in the world around us. And I am struck with amazement that of all the things I see that are, say, abnormal, let's say from the mental health perspective, this could be depression, panic attacks, hearing voices, addiction. But there's so many things that cover everything, that narcissism is not frequent compared to a lot of other things. So it's small in terms of say, a narcissistic diagnosis. Right. It's much less than many other things, but it causes the lion's share. I don't just mean the most compared to anything else, but I think more than 50% the majority of bad things, evil things, destructive things that I see in the world around us. I think narcissists are wildly destructive because they are driven completely, they are lodged completely in the lane of envy.

Can you try to sneak up, and we don't want to be lost in definitions, but can you try to sneak up to a definition, non clinical definition of narcissism that we're talking about?

So narcissism is a deep, pervasive and unquestioned sense of inadequacy in the self that comes along with anger and fear and vulnerability, fear of destruction, fear of annihilation that is compensated for by aggression, by the mechanics of envy, by trying to make the self seem better at the expense of others, by taking from others, by being completely cavalier to the thoughts and feelings of others. That narcissism is not arrogance. Narcissism is the opposite of arrogance. There is such a deep sense of inadequacy and incompetence in the self that the defensive structure around that becomes dominated by, by like rocket fueled envy.

So the machinery of narcissism is envy. But what do you make of the kind of more popularly discussed kind of symptom of narcissism, which is a seeming not caring about other people, Sort of a very inward facing focus in terms of the calculation you make when making decisions about the world.

Narcissistic people definitely care about other people, right? It's people who are schizoid, right? And say that don't necessarily register other people. Right? But narcissism, people care about other people, but it's entirely vis a vis the self, right? If I'm schizoid I don't really notice or care much who you are. Right? But if I'm narcissistic, I absolutely care because I'm watching every last detail of you. What might you have that's better than me? Right? It's an incredibly intense focus upon individuals and demographics of people. But the priority, the goal is entirely about the self. Which is why then it can become easy to say I don't care if a million people die. How different is that from going out and destroying one person or a million people? It's in the same category of those people only their existence is only meaningful in how it relates to me.

But it's still meaningful. It just seems like a very difficult leap to take that I don't care that a million people die. That seems to be, even with envy, that seems to be a big like feeling and thought to have. If you at all care about them, are other people, I guess tools for alleviation of your sense of inadequacy, right.

I mean I don't even care about in that like being caring at all. I mean caring about in that, noticing that the person exists, right? I mean someone who wants money and notices that there's a hundred dollar bill out cares about that or they don't care about the $100 bill and that doesn't mean anything to them, doesn't have thoughts and feelings, but it's going to attract attention. They care about it because it's something that they want. Right. The same way people will care about others, but only from the perspective of, do you have things that I want, or can I feel better about myself by taking something from you, by making things worse for you?

People often talk about narcissism as, like, the opposite of empathy, but sort of empathy, again, depends how you define it, but is a careful consideration of the mental space of another person, of how the other person sees the world. And so you're kind of saying that narcissistic people would also be very good at that in order to understand how maybe the other person can be manipulated or something to alleviate your sense of inadequacy.

Right. So there's a difference between the mechanics of empathy. So let's say again, we can define things different ways. Let's say empathic attunement is the ability to be attuned and to think, okay, what's going on in you? What might you be thinking? What might you be feeling? Some people have a lot of empathic attunement, but we could look at that as mechanistic.

Right.

It doesn't equate to care.

Right.

An empathic attunement can come along with empathy or not. So, yes, people who are narcissistic, they can mentalize. Well, so you mentalize, meaning the ability to. To understand or to consider thoughts, feelings, motivations, and other people. Right. So people who are narcissistic can have empathic attunement or mentalization, depending upon how we want to describe those things. But that has nothing to do with care, with actual empathy or kindness or consideration.

So in that sense, empathy, usually popularly used, means that you care like your happiness is aligned. I need to read this book. I've read so little science fiction. That's been one of my goals for this year, to catch up on some science fiction. So Robert Hyland from Stranger in a Strange Land has this quote about love, which is love is that condition where another person's happiness is essential to your own. So that's a good definition, I guess, of empathy, where you're very sensitive, so mechanistically very sensitive to the state of another person's mind. And your goal is to maximize their happiness. It's like essential to your own happiness. So the happinesses are aligned. And when that's elevated to its highest forms, you can call that love, romantic love, friendship, and so on. Okay.

One more thing about the narcissist is some people can be sort of Benign narcissists, where they want great things for themselves, right? But if they have enough great things, they can sort of tolerate others being happy, too. And these are people who sometimes are actually quite highly liked, right? Because they have to have the most money, the most power, the most of anything, anything more than anyone else could challenge. But as long as I have that, it's okay that you have some too, right? And then that can make you happy and can make you like me. Right? So benign narcissists can be well liked from that perspective, but it's still all about them. And that can change if, for example, there's a scarcity of resources now. Right. But they're not people who are being overtly destructive, although that they're over the border into the, you know, into the envy territory. Right. Malignant narcissists are very different where they then want to have everything. So they. So even if I have a thousand times more than you do, I still envy you what you have because I want to have. I don't think I can feel good enough about myself unless I have everything. And once I have everything, I won't feel good enough about myself either, and then I'll have to have more. Right. It's like, that's malignant narcissism, which we think of as sociopathy. Right. Again, we can define these words in different ways, but they're very, very negative concepts. That's profound. Sociopathy, malignant narcissism, envy writ large.

So sociopathy is malignant narcissism. That's a convenient way to think about it.

No, because we can do sort of sociopathic things but not be sociopathic, like. Well, you tell a white L. It's. It's. It's like sort of sociopathy on steroids. Right. Is. Is then, you know, envy writ large is malignant narcissism.

Well, just like you're saying, like, there's empathic attunement, as you said, so there's the. The mechanistic aspect of empathy and sociopathy, and then there's the big label. You get attached if you're just doing that thing regularly, I guess, living your.

Life through that lens.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

And is there a nice spectrum that's like narcissism, sociopathy, and psychopathy? Is it all the same kind of nice stroll through the woods off the cliff or.

Not really, because the words don't have clear definitions like psychopathy and sociopathy. There's no real definition of psychopath or psychopathy. Or does that mean someone sociopathic but Psychotic. There's really not. We end up using those words colloquially, which is why, you know, concepts that we can define like envy, empathic attunement, narcissism, even though there might be nuances in definitions, like, we can define them in ways that are widely accepted, including within psychology and psychiatry.

So it's nice to just think about this broad umbrella of narcissism and the levels to which it's benign or malignant, and then also separating into the different mechanisms, like interaction by interaction, which sometimes can be narcissistic. But broadly speaking, do you do everything through the lens of malignant narcissism that makes you a sociopath or a malignant narcissist?

Yes. And the thing I would add to that is the thought about culture. How does the cultures we're in, whether it's the culture of a household, the culture of a community, the culture of a nation, or the world, how does that impact what unfolds in that person? And then how does what unfolds in that person impact that culture?

Well, that's the question is what unfolds in that person? How does culture affect it? But how does your own psychological development unfold that? Because narcissism in leaders is the most impactful thing. Right. Who are the most impactful individuals? What is the most impact of individual psychology? We have, it's usually leaders of countries or leaders of major organizations and so on. And one of the things you mentioned with benign narcissism, that seems to be aligned with success, Right. If you care about your own success, that that's going to be. You're more likely to be. Have narcissistic tendencies, I suppose. And so my question is, when you follow that thread of narcissism to become the leader of a country now, you have a lot of new interesting psychological complexities to deal with, like power. That old cliche that power corrupts, does that. Is it possible for power to corrupt the human mind to where it pushes you farther and farther into malignant narcissism, into this destructive envy? What are your thoughts on power? Like the effect of power on the human mind?

Yeah, power is an accentuator. Right. An intensifier. Right. So. So I think it is true that there are people who can be sort of in a gray area where there are malignant narcissistic tendencies and behaviors, but there are also ways in which that person can think outside of themselves and think in a broader way and think sort of kindly about others, and they're sort of trying to navigate whether they're aware or not that they're trying to navigate between one and the other. And then the allure of power is, well, just look, just exercise that power and you'll feel better. Better, Right. It'll show you, right. That you're good enough. Look at the power you have and whatever may be going on in the person's mind that then power, yes. Can corrupt. Yes. I think that's why we have to have checks and balances, right? Because we don't, you know, we are all inscrutable to ourselves, let alone to others. So we must have checks and balances, and we should always have them on ourselves as well as on others. We should want that for the health of ourselves and the world around us. So I think all of that is true. But there are also people who don't necessarily become corrupted by power.

Right.

There can be an understanding and a grounding that they're a steward of power, a shepherd. I mean, the ways people describe utilizing power and utilizing it in a benign way that then fosters the healthy aspects of self. Right? So like gratitude and humility. If we could add a healthy dose of gratitude and humility to everyone or to our society, there would be a sea change. But how do you feel gratitude? How do you feel humility? Those things are incompatible with narcissism, envy, with really the bad poll of things that we're talking about. And part of the reason I'm so focused in my work and really what runs through all of my thoughts about life is the impact of trauma, because trauma creates these false lessons and it walls us off from truth and. And it starts to point towards the unhealthy ways of trying to feel better about ourselves. But we have the health in us too. We have those seeds of health too, that can grow into being a steward of power and sharing power, being considerate and kind. And we see a lot of that in the world too, right? It's not all just the evil. We see plenty of people who do good and who are generous of spirit, and we have both in us. And it is. I think you're talking about our culture and what the seeds that we sow and the climate that we set, including putting governors and boundaries around. How do we reign in or say that the more aggressive, the more envious or destructive is unacceptable, right? How do we foster the part that's kind and considerate and reflective and slow to judge of? Like, hey, let's learn a little bit more. Like, how do we foster that? And I think a lot of that comes back to early Childhood education. I mean, I think we don't do nearly enough to protect children. And as a corollary to that, we don't do nearly enough to educate children. And we said, I want to write a book. Second book I write is going to be everything I needed to know about life, I learned as a second year postgraduate psychiatry resident. It's like, why? Why then did I learn so much about unconscious motivation, about the impact of trauma, about how we can be envious and how we can act out even about how our emotions trump logic in us? Why don't we teach these things when we're young enough to understand why is that other kid bullying me? Or why, just because I'm a little bit bigger, do I want to go thump that other kid on the head? What's going on? We don't do those things. We're just tripping ahead of ourselves. And we don't stop and think, how are we using our resources? How are we. How are we shepherding forward the next generation? Which, by the way, is a generation that's going to determine our fates, too, as we get older. But we don't do that. I often think of in the Olympics, you see this, great sprinters, and they've got to come out of the blocks perfectly, because if they come out of the blocks a little bit too fast, they're going to fall over. They're going to just fall forward. And I often see that in my head about us as humans and as a culture that we're rushing so far forward, we don't stop and say, wait, let's keep the basics here. The basic techniques of how are we navigating forward in life? Or do we just throw all those away? Because I can get some benefit by saying that you're bad, even though what's being leveled against you is wrong. Why do I take that or do I say, no? There's something more important here that we want to shepherd forward in ourselves as a culture. And I think preventing childhood trauma and changing the ways that we educate children and adults would could again, make a sea change and maybe set us on a course towards, Even towards a greater likelihood of survival as a species.

Yeah. So talking to people in elementary school about human nature and teaching them how people can be resentful and envious and how to deal with your emotions, how to. Yeah, these basic interaction things about human relationships, about friendships, about betrayal, about love, about all those things. Like, it just. It's actually really strange that we don't. We kind of hope the parents talk about that kind of stuff, right? But then the parents often, you know, need therapy themselves.

The parents that didn't learn it. Right. I mean, I'm not joking that I was. I was mad, you know, second year after medical school, like, how is it, like, I think of things in my own life and. And how much shame I felt after my brother's suicide. I was already an adult. I was a young adult, but I felt so much shame. I had no understanding that, oh, it's a reflex to trauma, to feel guilt and shame. And that, of course I was feeling that. It didn't mean it was true because I felt it. But I mapped the fact that I felt ashamed to the fact that I should have felt guilty and ashamed and led to some very negative things in my life that I had to pull myself back from and recover from. And, like, I didn't know that, right? I didn't know the automaticity of the reflex and how pervasive it can be and how it can put blinders on us. And, I mean, it's just one example, but, you know, it's an example of something big that happens to people that we don't learn about. And I find myself sometimes having conversations with a person. So, you know, I still do a lot of clinical care of having conversations with a person after a tragedy. And I'm saying I can't believe. Right? Again, I'm saying the things that this person didn't learn in elementary school because none of us did. And then look at the misery and the suffering. And then I think this is one person among how many millions among us who try and go about their way without knowing things that are easily knowable because they don't even know that they're knowable because we don't teach them to ourselves.

So how to deal with trauma, that trauma happens, first of all, that suffering can happen, and small trauma and big trauma, all of it can happen, and there's natural ways to deal with it. So in the case of trauma, as you write about, and we can also just talk about some more of the details of that. But it's good to bring it to the surface, to talk about it, to not be ashamed, to hide it inside, to be some kind of secret that it's actually. I mean, there's a lot of positive things to say here, at least from my perspective. One is it's discussing trauma and dealing with trauma together with other human beings by talking about it is a path to deep friendship and intimacy with those people. There's a dark aspect to trauma, to war, that communicating it or sharing it bonds you.

Yes.

So, like, the other side of trauma is like love is you need that hardship, not you don't need it. But hardship and trauma can often be a catalyst for a deep human connection if you bring it to the surface as opposed to kind of hide it on the inside. If we can just linger on it. Because you've been through a few very traumatic events in your life. When you were 25 years old, as you mentioned, your brother committed suicide. What did that event teach you about life, about death, and about the human mind?

Well, it certainly brought me face to face with the truths of life and death because I had not had a major trauma before then. So there wasn't a major trauma sort of in my developmental years that what can carry forward is a sort of omnipotence defense. Right. I mean, the thought is that when we're toddlers, we all have like an omnipotence defense, which is like, I can just try and get up and run and move, and if I run into something, I'll get up and do it again. Right. That we, you know, we kind of have to. And it's partly the protection of the parent, et cetera, but we, we think we can get out there in the world and do things and we just do. And if we don't have major traumas, we can sort of carry through the, oh, like bad things aren't going to happen to me, you know, like, I know that they're there and I know they happen to people, but they don't happen to me. Right. And sometimes what will happen is being confronted with such a tragedy wipes that away very, very quickly. And then that person feel extremely exposed, like, oh, I thought that I was going to be okay, and now I know that I'm not. And that can start to lead to. And what does that mean? And now is this all coming for me now did I get so lucky? For 25 years, nothing bad happened. Nothing but bad things are going to be happening. Am I cursed? Is my family cursed? Right. And I think that leads to say what the learning about the human mind in retrospect, I think I understood at the time to some degree, but not like I do now. I can put words to it now, right. Of like, how incredibly important, powerful, powerfully important negative emotion is, right. That how a sense of guilt and shame and vulnerability can just pervade our entire life perspective. So all of a sudden we're swimming in a very different soup. And it's a frightening soup and it's a toxic soup Soup. And I'm most struck by that. And that goes along with the idea that we're not taught that emotion always beats logic. I think the idea of Descartes and the idea that we're rational creatures, that kind of comes down to us through Western thought, is completely not true. We're rational creatures only if there is an emotion grabbing for our attention. We're attending to one another. We're being very logical. What we're doing now, if we heard a frightening noise right outside the door, like, we'd be entirely different, right? The emotion would trump everything and say, stop paying attention to this right now. Safety is at stake. And we'd think differently, feel differently, behave differently, right? And this is what happens to us. Not just in situations where something drags us from, yanks us from one emotional state to another, but it can be very, very pervasive. So my sense of anger, frustration, inadequacy, and then soothing in unhealthy ways, you know, soothing by drinking too much and then kind of hating myself in the first place and hating the world around me and then, you know, starting to think, well, who cares? You know, what happens? Like, you know, there's some very dark thoughts and choices that came from a changed perspective of self in the world.

So what do you do in that because of trauma? Again, small or large, you find yourself swimming or drowning in a soup of negative emotions. What do you do? What do you do with that emotion? I mean, we don't have to even talk about trauma. I think the interesting thing is any one of us throughout the day can find ourselves taking a bit of a dip in the pool of negative emotion. What do we do with that?

The first thing is to separate how we feel from what's true, because we don't do a good job of that as humans. If I feel bad about myself, it's very easy to. Then I conclude like, I'm bad, right? If I feel ashamed of myself, I conclude I'm a terrible person who's shameful, right? This is an old psychodynamic concept of what they used to call it an observing ego. It still gets called that. It's not ego in the sense of arrogance. It's the ability to step outside and to see ourselves, right? So that's what lets us keep the difference between our feelings, right, and what we know to be true. Like, we could be very angry at someone. It's. I think that person's terrible. I think the person's stupid. I think that right now, because, like, something negative just passed between us this inside of me, it's just because of how I feel. Like when I can separate that, how do I actually think about that person?

Right?

And you know, we get driven so, so frequently by how we feel. Because how we think, therefore what we believe, right, just kind of comes on its. He feels as if the feeling is dragging it along. And I've been struck by that. It's one of the things that has struck me so the most, among the very most in 20 years of working as a psychiatrist is how we are led by our feelings, our emotions, as if they are truth and then they create truth because we embrace what they're telling us as true. And that is, I think, incredibly, I think it's how people learn prejudice. I think it's how people learn self hatred. I think it's how we learn so many distractions, destructive behaviors. And then the, the blinders on us come in more and more and more and more. So separate. You know, we're driven by what we feel. Unless we understand that what we feel is different from what we know to be true or what we can decide on one way or another.

And that requires realizing and catching the emotions themselves. Realizing that it's an emotion, a feeling comes into your mind, overtakes you. A feeling of anger, dislike, hatred, all of that just comes in. It's like, why did that person just cut me off in traffic? Or something like that feeling. So what, you just kind of take it as a feeling and realize it's a feeling that doesn't represent some deep reality about the world that's fundamental or you, that you just kind of watch it and let it pass, which is the natural way of things.

Yeah. Or decide if it means anything. You know, if I'm mad, right. Someone cut me off and I feel hatred and I want to destroy them. Right. To stop and think, look, I, I've got that in me. I, I, I can. You know, are the stressors running too high in my life? Like, is it really good? Should I be, should I be on this road 10 minutes behind schedule? Like, is it, what am I really doing? So we can learn? But, but yes, it's an observation skill.

Right.

And it's an observation skill that we can develop. I often think of it something called the tapestry theory, which I think initially was a theodicy of explaining. I believe this is true. I'm not sure of this, that the idea was that, oh, we don't see God's plan because we're up too close to it. As if there was a beautiful tapestry on the wall. And we're standing right up it. We're only going to see one part of it. We need to stand back from it. And I remember learning that, and I religion studies class, being really fascinated with that at the time. And I think that there are a lot of things we do that about. And in training ourselves to have an observing ego, what we're saying is, hey, just the busyness of life or my own impulses or the pool of emotions are trying to pull me up right close to whatever tapestry there is there. And I want to sort of resist that. I'm better off if I really stay further behind it. And then I make a choice if I want to come close to it. If there's some really positive emotion, it's friendship or it's love or it's nurturing. You know what? Let me come right up to this. Right? But I want to choose when I'm doing that. I don't want some drive. I didn't decide to take me by the back of the head and put me up against that tapestry.

So the interesting exercise for me, and I think for a lot of people in modern civilization, is the Internet with social media, that it's almost like going to the gym or something like that. At least that's the way I see it. Because there's a bunch of forces on social media that are trying to make you feel things. Most of it is kind of in the negative space of feelings because there is actually a strong gravity pull to negative feelings for some reason, and the brain notices them more. I don't know what the. That pull is, but it's there and you get to observe it on social media. Like if you actually just scroll through social media, you feel the gravitational pull of negative emotions. And I, I just see as a kind of exercise of like, you feel the pull. Just like when you go to the gym, there's a resistance. And I practice, like stepping, stepping away to look at the tapestry. Right. It's. And there's different mechanisms I think all of us have to learn. For me, there's a kind of. You mentioned gratitude and humility. So if somebody, if it's me personally, I've recently gotten attacked a few places here and there. If they're saying that they're much smarter than me, I practice kind of humility like you mentioned, and I kind of imagine that they are smarter than me. Those things help me to kind of pull away. And then maybe they have a lesson to teach me. Like, I don't take their sort of negative comments to Heart. But I imagine the human being and like that they, they might have a lesson to teach me. And in general, when it's more amorphous kind of negative feeling, I'll think the other thing is the gratitude. Just like different versions, almost memeifiable versions of like, oh, this is pretty cool. Like we got a thing going here. There's like human civilization like, like bickering and having a little fun, like lunch, food fight. And it's kind of cool, like we get to interact in this way and there's a bit of humor. There's. It's like Thanksgiving dinner. Like if you like Thanksgiving dinner, if you're arguing about politics, it can feel like really intense, like I can't believe you said this. But if you zoom out, it's like family. This is like, this is amazing. So that kind of feeling really helps. And. But it's like, it really is like going to the gym them, it's like building up a muscle to be able to pull away from those emotions. I don't think I get to practice that kind of emotion regular day to day life because it's hard to get those reps on social media. You can really get the reps in. It's kind of cool. That's the way I see social media is a chance to sort of practice that stoicism of gratitude, of humility, of loving other people in the face of this negative emotion, all that.

Yes. And there's a certain kind of psychotherapy that talks a lot about this idea that everything is as it should be. Which doesn't mean from some moral or justice point, it's just that often if you look at things, one thing leads to another, to another, to another in a way that's actually very, very predictable, even though we might be surprised about it. And so an example, so I would say that gratitude often does come along with a healthy pride, right? So you could say in the example you gave, hey, I'm being assailed on social media.

Okay.

So you could say, well you know, there was a time I sat out, I set forth to impact people, right? To be able to reach people and to impact them. Right. And look, I feel a sense of both gratitude and pride that I've done that because you did it, because of your effort, your work, your intelligence, your thoughts, you're responsible for it. But also you feel gratitude because any one of us who's here and has any opportunity has reason to feel immense gratitude. So then you can say, okay, what's actually going on here is something successful. I set out to do something and I'm doing it. And what it brings with it absolutely includes being a sale. There's no surprise there, right? Because people who have anything good serve as lightning rods for envy. So then, yes, there will be people who want to make up lies or whatever they want to do. Because you become a lightning rod for envy by having succeeded at the thing you set out to do, about which you can feel a healthy pride and gratitude. And then I think that kind of puts it in its place. I mean, you're still going to make decisions about it, but. But it makes sense. Then you have a mechanism of understanding it that not only makes sense to you, but reflects the truth of what you actually have done and achieved and what's going on in the world around you.

Well, I wonder if we're all kind of a little bit unique in this, because for me, maybe it's useful to kind of talk through my own experience of. It is for me, I try to avoid, especially in those situations, to feel pride because I'm just looking empirically. I feel way happier if I focus on humility. If I ever think of, like, oh, yeah, you know, when you do something meaningful or you become more popular, you're going to experience these kinds of. I feel the attacks more and I. It's like me versus the world. That's the feeling that you start getting. And that does not create a pleasant feeling. So to me, the pleasant feeling is like stepping away, like kind of laughing at it all with a smile and not like in a negative, like laughing at people, but just like laughing at the theater of it, the circus of it. Like this whole absurd existence we got going on. And then just having a humility in, like, everybody has a lesson to teach me. It just makes me feel good. The pride thing, I do like feeling when in a positive pool of emotion. So if I'm building a trinket and I finish it, I'm like, really happy with myself. Like, I finished this thing. And I usually like to do that alone. Like, I don't need an audience for pride. I like to sit there and just like, ooh, this is cool. I did that. You know. But I just. I find that in social interactions, pride is just a danger. It's a dangerous drug for me because it like such a small. It's a small step away from then losing all the humility. And then you start getting very defensive. And that's not going to. This just starts you on a spiral of negative emotion. But I also, I mean, with everybody you've mentioned this, it will probably sneak up to it in different directions. I do think there's different brains that we all have. Like my brain is exceptionally self critical, like non stop. It's like, it's like an engine that's always there and. But at the same time you're. I'm able to zoom out and have gratitude and it's as if there's like two brains and they're like cohabitating happily. And I can. The better I get at this, the more I can use the one that's self critical when I'm trying to be productive. Because naturally I'm super lazy. So I'm trying not to be less lazy. I'll be self critical.

Right.

And then when I'm not being lazy, why just there's a special moment. I want to enjoy that moment. I'll turn on the, the gratitude engine. I feel like generic advice that people would give. If your brain is self critical, that's not a good thing. Like you should probably get rid of that. I don't know about that because it seems to be working. Yeah, like I, I kind of like it. I kind of like this grumpy old man that's in there. That's like, like that thing you did that really sucked. I was like. And I kind of. You know, there's a movie, Grumpy Old Men. I like that grumpy voice. The grumpy cat is in there and it's nice. But yeah, it can have bad effects on relationships and on maybe my well being maybe as you get older and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, you have to monitor all the, this kind of stuff. But I don't know, I don't, I don't know which one is like. Because you've kind of highlighted. It's good to have gratitude and humility, but it's also good to have a little bit of pride. I wonder what that like set of ingredients for healthy, what like healthy life looks like for each of us, whether we have to customize and figure out what that is because some of the cake is already baked is the problem. And because of the trauma, like if I was like 8 years old, maybe I could be a little more flexible. But at this point, like you got the thing you got and it's hard.

To like you can do a lot with it.

You could.

It may not be easy, but there's a lot of plasticity and a lot.

Of pliability there across all ages.

Again, people are different and there may be idiosyncrasies of why one Person is in a different place. But as a general rule, I think the answer is absolutely yes. I mean, people have evolved and I've worked with people who've really changed themselves and broadened their conception and understanding. They're in their 80s. Or, or I think we can do it at any stage of life. And I would make a case for intrapsychics. So not between people necessarily, but inside of oneself for the feeling of pride. And maybe if we call it self esteem, let's say we call it self esteem, or we could call it healthy pride, we could put either word to it. But if you think about what we're trying to avoid, say a sense of inadequacy, then it is good to own what's ours. We can put ourselves a little bit out of balance either in terms of building up resentments or in terms of decreasing self confidence if we're not owning everything that's ours. So a thought I would have about, let's say about some pride or some self esteem is it can work against vulnerability, which we know can also in some situations push us towards jumping the boundary into envy and all of that. So let's think about vulnerability. If you conceive, okay, people are assailing me and you just go to a place of gratitude, it can send a message that, okay, I'm just lucky and I hope I continue to get lucky as opposed to, like, that's not true, right. There's ability inside of me and discernment inside of me that tells me I can have a greater sense of confidence that I'll navigate what comes my way. Right. So because the pride or the self esteem part is owning what we've contributed to the goodness we've created. Right. Which does, in a sense, helps us feel better about ourselves and it also helps us feel armed against, say, the slings and arrows of whatever outrageous fortune may come next.

I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. Again, disagreeing with an expert here. Yes, I think that's generally good advice. But I think, think you mentioned vulnerability. I think it's like I've just been doing a lot of research on rocket engines and fuel. Speaking of fuel, I just think I get a lot from being vulnerable because vulnerable leads to intimacy in friendships and relationships. I get a lot from being intimately close with human beings just on a friendship, on an ideal level, in conversations and so on, on. And so I would rather err on the side of vulnerability. Like to me, pride is destructive. I think I already, yeah, I already have a pretty Good engine that says.

Like.

Life is awesome. I don't need help for that. That's fine. That one is working. It's the, it's. I, I just feel like, like the way to face the world that's full of uncertainty, that could be full of cruelty is with humility and gratitude. I don't know, this pride thing, it feels like. I know that for a lot of people it's really important to really, really work on pride to make sure they don't crumble under the pressure of like, they don't give into this insecurity that destroys them. But I just, for me, empirically speaking, I seem to be happier facing the world with humility and just being grateful. The pride I'm really worried about, it feels more destructive than anything.

See, what I think as you're telling me that I don't want to be presumptuous, but I make some thoughts or some conclusions that tell me, hey, you're in a pretty healthy place. And the reason I say that is because I agree completely about vulnerability. I mean, think of it. Humility and gratitude make us vulnerable, right? If like, wow, I'm grateful. Thank you. I'm grateful for you. You know, we could get shot down or something. You know, something bad could happen, something could make us feel bad. So yes, we need vulnerability. If we try and eliminate vulnerability, we're living miles into the envy land, right? So you're describing a healthy vulnerability, but then my brain says that's because on the other side of this, the seesaw, so to speak, has to be a healthy sense of self, whether we call it self esteem or healthy pride. And then I'll cite what I think is the evidence for that is you describe the negative voice, right? As like the grumpy cat, right? But that's a good negative voice to have, right? Because it's telling you like, hey, that wasn't your best, like, come on, do better, or right, like you can do better like this, you know, there's a negative voice in some ways, but it believes in you. Where that voice could be, it could be a negative voice that says, you didn't do that well because you suck. You don't deserve anything good. Right? Why should you even be alive? I mean, that's the negative voice that can gain so much force if there isn't a balance of healthy self esteem. So I think because you're well balanced, you have what you need, and then having more of it seems like, oh, that's not so good. But there are people whose negative voice isn't the grumpy cad. It's hateful, right. And then that's a person who needs to bring that into greater balance.

Yeah. I think my negative voice is like a grumpy cat. That's like a French existentialist, maybe a little bit of a nihilist, but just kind of is Sartre's cat. Yeah, Sartre's cat. So it doesn't get hateful. It's not like a Hitler cat. So it's a little more. Yeah, I guess there is kind of like this line that we've come across a couple of times between the benign and the malignant.

Right.

But of course you have to monitor that line. I just, I think you have to be careful when you face really difficult situations of as you go on through life, more and more difficult, you face a lot of loss and suffering, especially later in life. You have to be careful with that voice. That grumpy cat can get awfully confident. And then if you don't have any source of positive emotions in your life, you can become too heavy of a burden.

Yes. Which I think this leads us to what I think is a really important fact, right. That there are some people, like a significant subset of people who get happier as they get older. They have more contentment, a stronger sense of self. You might think, how could that ever happen?

Right?

Like we're getting closer to death, we're accumulating insults, Right. Everything hurts a little bit more and we have less energy and we accumulate losses and traumas. Why would anyone be healthier across time? Happier across time? And what we see is it's linked to the things that we're talking about. It's linked to say, let's say vulnerability versus pride. There's a good balance there. There's a lot of humility, there's a lot of self esteem. The person is. Is spending a lot of time standing back from the tapestry and looking at it.

Right.

And what can come into people is in sort of a sense of equanimity. Like I sort of understand, you know, I'm being the best person I can be. And that's not always even great. And there are things that I don't feel great about even while I'm trying to do that. But look, I'm being who I'm choosing to be, Right. And that doesn't have to be in some big way. I'm not saying that means any one specific thing. You know, that can mean the person who's taking care of their cat and tending their garden, like that's enough we have to have love, the ability to put good things out in the world and to put our ability to work and to make things different out into the world and make things better. And if we're doing that, we get happier across time because we come to a sense of peace with ourselves. I'm not supposed to be everything. I'm not supposed to do everything. I'm not supposed to fix everything. Right? I'm also not supposed to suffer all the time for the things I haven't. Haven't gotten right. You know what? I guess I'm kind of. And it leads back to Winnicott, right?

The.

The British physician. I'm, you know, I'm good enough. And that seems to help people feel. Feel happy, you know, contentment, and be generative and productive into later life. It's like that's what we all should be wanting. But it's even. It's kind of an afterthought, though some people are like that, as opposed to, wait a second, right? Like, what's going on with them? And let's do all of that.

Albert Camus writes in Mythosis, quote, there's only one real serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that. So basically, to be or not to be, do you think there's a truth to that statement? This question of why live at all? Do you think there's truth to that statement? Being a really, really important question for us to answer.

Yes. Yes.

And what's the answer?

I think the answer is yes, and I think Camus answered it yes, too. I love his writing, and I think there was a streak of nihilism that I think grew in his writing over the years. And the thought is, I think, that Camus died by suicide. I think we're not sure of that because it was a car accident, but I've always read that as the primary scholarly opinion. And I think it's interesting that after his death, a book called the first man was published, which I don't know if he had intended to publish. I don't remember the specifics about it, but it's about him as a child. And it's interesting. The first man, he was the first man in his existence, right? The most. The one that felt and experienced everything. And there's sadness and distress and all in that book. But there's a beauty of life and living and experience. And I think to compare that beauty, like, that's life. Even if something's Difficult and scary and sad, like there's something beautiful around the corner and here's a kind person and a new discovery, you know, more what was in him as a child. And I think that we can get jaded as we get, as you and I were just talking about a few minutes ago, we can accentuate the negative and foster the negative and come to a place where we're looking for some in depth philosophical answer, you know, some thick book, you know, that's going to explain all that to us instead of the simplicity that we've been talking about. I think humility, gratitude, helps us have just simple positive experiences. Feelings of contentment, feelings of connection with another person, learning, discovery. And I think the answer to Camus question, question is yes. And I think it lies in his writing about when he was a child, which I think he saw as less important than his later writings, and the intellectual heaviness when I think maybe he had lost his way a little bit from the things he understood when he was younger.

So another way to talk about it, and I'd love to hear what you think is about these broad categories. Let me be started with Kierkegaard, of existentialism, absurdism and nihilism. And I think Camus considered himself an absurdist, not actually an existentialist. It's kind of a middle ground where I think existentialists, I don't want to characterize it in the wrong way, and there's a lot of different definitions, but I think existentialists ultimately do think that there is meaning in sort of pursuing the passion of life, like pursuing the mo, like in living life. That's where you discover the meaning at that individual level of fully embracing life. And I think sort of nihilism is, again, it's kind of like a spectrum. But nihilism basically says there's no meaning and it doesn't matter, nothing matters. I don't even know. But somehow that lands you in a place that's totally uninspired. Maybe nihilists would disagree with that. Maybe there's a way to live a creative life, life in a nihilistic mindset. And I think absurdism is somewhere in the middle where pursuing meaning at all is not a good idea. So kind of, I think existentialists say you should be looking for meaning and it's to be discovered in your own actions, in your own life, in the moment. And absurdism says life is absurd. Nothing makes sense. Don't look for the meaning, Just live, just be. I think that's kind of the later Camus kind of philosophy. I don't know if you can sort of comment on these kind of nuanced ideas here. If there is no religious guide to your life, what do you think about this kind of search for meaning? Do you see that there's some wisdom in the existentialist perspective of discovering it in your own life, in this passion, in this kind of day to day existence, in the moments of your life that bring you joy, that kind of thing.

You're bringing different sort of perspectives and trying to tease apart like, well, wait, what are the differences in those perspectives? Right? And I think what it points out is that, okay, we tend to conflate things as human beings, right? And to take two different things and try and make them into one. But we also, I think on the other end of the spectrum get very overly reductionist. And I think that when we get too overly reductionist, we lose the ability to learn from anything or to generate meaning. Think about Sartre, who is the thought of existentialism is so consistent with him, who on the one hand wrote about very clear terms like this is what it is and this is what it isn't, and here's how you're going to make your meaning in a very academically proscribed way. But he also wrote short stories like the Wall, where there's something totally absurd happens as part of the story. So I think what ends up happening is people either reduce themselves or get associated with something that by being overly reductionist takes us away from meaning. Right? The idea that, look, we don't know if there is an overarching religious meaning or what we call a religious meaning or purpose, we don't know that. So, okay, if we take that as a given that people who say that they know are having faith, like how Spinoza described faith. Faith is that you don't know but you believe anyway, right? It's not because you have faith now you know something, right? Because I think that's a slippery slope to the persecution of others. So if we say, okay, we don't know, then we're left either deciding, okay, well then the hell with everything. There's that movie, A Strange Brew, Bob and Doug McKenzie, where the brakes don't work on the car and one of them says, oh, why bother steering? So if we don't know that there's meaning, like, why bother steering? Let's just give up the ghost. And I don't think that's even what the nihilist. I mean, I think Bakunin said we should get rid of everything that we've ever created except Beethoven's ninth Symphony and start over from there. But so even people who are very nihilistic or associated with that, a lot of them were just not liking what we had built, right? So if we accept that a lot of what we have built as humans inside of us and outside of us is really counterproductive and doesn't help us, and that absurd things happen in the world, right? And that often the way social structures and systems build up, you build themselves up, is absurd, I think our healthcare system operates in a way that's absurd, right? So if we accept that there are absurdities that we don't know if there's truth, then what are we left with? But like, well, let's try and make meaning, right? Ortega I. Gasset said, yo. So yo. Aimi Circumstancia, right? I myself and my circumstances, right? Which is like, look, we can't control everything. We live in circumstances around us, but within those circumstances, we can make decisions and define ourselves. And I think the brilliance of that, and I think tying it all together, right, In a way that's not trying to be. In a sense, it ties it all together by not trying to answer everything concisely that, yes, we can make meaning. Like, we see that if someone trips in front of me, I could walk around them or I could help them up. I mean, no one can tell me that it doesn't matter what I do. I absolutely reject the idea that, oh, I could step over them or on them or I could help them up and it doesn't matter. Oh, yeah, try being the person on the ground, right? So we create meaning, but we live in our circumstances and there are absurdities both within us and outside of us in our social structures. And there are a lot of things that pretend to have meaning that don't. And there's the shades of nihilism. But ultimately there's something going on here that's doing the best we can in the context of just not knowing.

Yeah, I tend to see. I don't know if it's genetic. I tend to think just observing the Internet, the number of memes there are, I think many other people are like me. I tend to see the humor and the absurdity. I tend to enjoy it from that kind of angle. I see the Kafkaesque nature of society, of different aspects of society, and just kind of notice the magic with a smile and just laugh at the circus of it all, because it is magical that the circus all comes together. It's like a little bit out of sync. And then there's a guy playing trombone. But overall it's pretty good. It's pretty good.

And we can look at that and just kind of marvel and go, huh? Right. Which I think is a relation to at least a lot of what we in the Western world think of as Eastern.

Right.

It's like as non attachment. Right. Because then if there's something absurd and it's like not good for me, you know, then I accept that too. Instead of getting angry about it and railing about it or seeing some cosmic meaning in it. Right. I think there's also a healthy non attachment in what you're saying too.

So there's, I mean, you mentioned Eastern thought. There's Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, but also Buddha have kind of spoke of life as suffering. Do you think there's truth to that? That suffering is a fundamental part of life?

I think it is a fundamental part of life. I don't think that means that life is suffering. Right. If we say, well, life is suffering, then what am I doing that I'm trying to erase from my mind the birth of my children, things that were filled with joy. Life is not entirely suffering, but life brings a lot of suffering. And for some people it brings such disproportionate suffering and the people don't survive the suffering. And I think when people are conscientious and empathic, that really bothers us. The suffering in our own lives and the fact that others at times could seem to be so overwhelmed by suffering that they don't even get a chance to see good. And I do think there's truth to that and there's sadness and distress to that. But to say therefore life is suffering I think is just completely untrue. And it ignores the fact that someone even made a trombone. Right. Let alone that there's a little bit out of sync and someone's playing the trombone, like that's cool. There's elements of the absurd that you said are neat and interesting. And if we start accepting that we can't understand or control everything, then we can accept and I think really love and foster the beauty in our lives. Yeah.

I think the word suffering is doing a little bit too much work because I think it's probably referring to the philosophical concept of that. Yeah. There's absurd. The absurdity.

Right.

That stuff just happens randomly. Evil people succeed, good people fail.

Right.

There's a seeming random injustice on occasion.

Right.

And occasion there's justice in. Yeah. All of it. That feels like. And maybe because it often there's a lot of loss and then there's a kind of matching, complementary aspect to any good feeling that all comes crashing down. Like every hello from a physics perspective ends in a goodbye. Like, that's a really sad thing. Like I've. I've, you know, all the amazing people I get to meet in my life, all the amazing experiences, eventually they have to end. And that's part of what makes them amazing.

But why is that sad? Is it because we're taught to think that it's like, look, at some point you and I are going to say goodbye today. Like, I hope we're richer for it, and then we take that goodness off with us. Like, I want to celebrate that because it's all part of the goodness. I think we're taught to think, oh, that's so bad. And it equates to death and misery. And I think it's often not that way.

I think there is a sadness to it. But I also don't think that sadness is not a negative thing. It's a. It's a different way to celebrate a beautiful thing. So there's a melancholic nature to it, something passing of. Of it, leaving. It's that old Louis CK thing that I go back to over and over from. From his show, Louis, where he was all heartbroken that he just broke up, you know, with. With somebody he loved. And he told about that to an old man and the old man said, you're a fool. That's the best part. I missed that part where you sort of are lingering in that loss. You're feeling the pain of that loss because that lasts the longest. It's the most intense, it's the most reliable. And it's a kind of celebration of the love you had. Like losing the love is still a celebration of the love. I think you don't want to over romanticize that. But there's some aspect of truth to that. Like that melancholic feeling of remembering a beautiful time that's no longer there is. Is a kind of celebration of it and is a kind of joyful experience, even though it's very easy to experience it as a negative emotion. I think it's just like you said. I mean, it's up to our mind to determine how that emotion is really felt. But it's a tricky one because it's like heartbreak to experience that as a positive thing.

People can reminisce at funerals, right, and laugh because people can be very, very, very sad and perceive that this person has died and perceive the sadness of it. But in perceiving that and really living in it, then you can have people who want to remember that person by telling a funny story. Why? Because each of those people carries that with them. So I think what you're saying is consistent with healthy function as human beings. Because we're going to encounter sadness and loss. What do we do with that? And do we do things that ultimately create some redemption or even reparation inside us, of us? And like, reparation is a big word in psychology, right? It's how we repair damage and loss. So if we lose someone and we're sad, can we, by telling funny stories about that person, remind ourselves that, hey, they're still inside of us? Whether they're out there looking at me, I don't know. But I can call that person to mind inside of us. And then we have something that's. That's good and beautiful that comes with that too.

In the introduction to your book on trauma, Lady Gaga wrote it. She wrote the forward, the intro. She said this about you. Quote, I can now say with certainty that this man saved my life. He made life worth living. This goes to our discussion about the. The mythic Sisyphus Camus question about why live? So I think, at least to me, she's one of the most brilliant and unique artists ever. So it's a difficult question, but a question of creativity. What role does trauma play in somebody like that, in this artist that has created some incredible things? What positive, constructive role does trauma serve? And what limiting role does it serve in preventing that person from flourishing anymore?

Trauma can certainly drive us to creativity, even to push against or to protest against what the trauma tells us. Trauma tells us lessons like nothing matters and you don't matter and nothing will ever be good and nothing is beautiful. And we can push against trauma. There is life in me. There's goodness for me to spread in the world, to express and spread. So I think trauma fuels creativity in many, many, many ways. Trauma also shuts down creativity, right? People who are, for. It's one example, trauma that escalates to the point where now the person is soothing it with alcohol. It's one example. And now the impact of the alcohol shuts down any creativity. So can people be creative and outward thinking without trauma? I think sometimes, if I remember correctly, people will use Immanuel Kant as an example of someone who I think hadn't traveled much and didn't have trauma. And like, look at what he knew.

He.

So, okay, there are going to be exceptions, right? But a lot of our creativity is in some ways fueled by our suffering, although it's complicated because it comes from generative places in us, right? So those places are there. They're not created by suffering. But maybe suffering makes an incentive or a passion inside of us. And a person. Stephanie, who you referred to, is just such an incredible, astounding creative force. And sure, some of that comes from trauma. Some of it comes from trauma fueling the generative creative places in her. But what I helped her to do, she's very generous with her words, but what I helped her to do was to see all that she is and all that the creativity in her is and all that there is to create through love and caring and compassion. And to again, see that. I mean, a lot of time that's, that's what I'm doing clinically. I think it's what good psychiatrists or mental health professionals do is we help people see the beauty that is there because oftentimes we're way too close up to that tapestry. And what brings us close is often the sad thing. So we're up close and all we see is the negative. I mean, it's easy then to get classically nihilistic, but by helping someone take a step back and to see who they are and what's in them, that's how people get better and it's how people reengage in, in life.

It's such a difficult thing because if you were to. From studying human beings, it seems like the optimal trajectory is having some trauma that doesn't destroy you, that forces you early in life to really struggle with the intricacies of the human condition. And then later in life, as you form and like, you build an expertise around and mastery, start to do exactly what you said, which is step back and look at the tapestry. So if you, if, if you don't have the trauma, it seems like just empirically speaking, there's of course, just a huge amount of data and all kinds of anecdotal evidence. But it, and I'm, I'm going to be careful here because maybe I'm romanticizing hardship, but it does seem that hardship in childhood, if it doesn't break you, can be constructive. It's like you said, having that trauma, one of the ways to fight it is to say, I am worth something, right? I am. And this is, you know, David Goggins talks about this. It's like, this is, I am somebody. I can be somebody special, and I'm going to prove it to you. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. Big thing. It's this engine that drives you forward. Yeah, comment on that. Because from a parent's perspective, you want a child to have an easy life. You want them to not have hardship, certainly not have trauma. But that's such a difficult dance because in some ways, a little bit of hardship and a gradually increasing amount of hardship that doesn't break you can really develop you into a really interesting, complicated person and it helps you flourish as a creative being. I don't know what to. I don't know. I don't know if there's a question that I just keep saying random things.

No, it makes. Look, I think it makes good. It makes good sense to me. I think you're trying to get at, like, we need trauma and like. And how are we defining it? Right? Because we say trauma, hardship, difficulties. I mean, we could set aside. We could. We could set apart, say, and differentiate things that are difficult but that are overcomeable, right? Versus things that. We could use the word trauma this way if we chose to, that are just entirely negative. Like someone saying, oh, you can't do that and you'll never succeed because. And then they tell you something about yourself because you're from here or you're this race, religion, whatever it is, right? We think, well, that could make someone say, hey, I'm going to show you I'm going to overcome, right? But then they're overcoming something bad, right? There's nothing good or helpful about that if someone's saying that. So the person has to overcome it. That's different than something that is placed in front of a person where the whole conception of it is something positive that you can make through effort. So I remember, I don't know, I think I was 15 years old. There was some rule you could then go, I don't think it was picking raspberries or blueberries, right? And I think. And my parents wanted me to see, like, hey, go see how that work as you. And now you got 50 cents at the end of it, right? And then you think about that when you want to buy baseball cards. Or you think about it and you work hard. And I can remember, like, it was hard and I was sweating and I was tired, but I learned from it. I mean, it's the reason I remember it today. So, yes, parents might want their kids to have a good life, but not necessarily an easy life. And I think that was done. They took me to do that so I'd have a greater sense of responsibility in a sense of hard work is meaningful and it's important And I think that that kind of thing is good. But if we separate that from something that's just denigrating prejudicial, I think those things aren't good, but they're unavoidable. So it's not necessarily that, oh, is some trauma good? I would look at it more that some trauma is unavoidable. I mean it's hard to. How do you go through life and not have any losses or anything negative or anything sad? And then people are people. There may be people who have not a lot of that and then there's a sort of complacency and they don't do as much as they could or feel as good as they could. Then there's other people who have a highly attuned emotional. People with very highly attuned emotional compasses for which a little bit of trauma becomes so intrusive. So so much of it is person driven. But I do want to distinguish between things that are just purely bad that we might overcome or find some fire in our belly about or whatever the case may be, and things that may be boundaries or barriers either directly, purposely placed or not, that in a sense invite us or inform us of the possibility of striving and overcoming finely in tuned emotional compasses.

It's so true that there is. That's a component of it too. There's almost genetic how sensitive you are to particular trauma. So little things can have a huge impact or gigantic things. Serious abuse in childhood can be by some people overcome more easily.

It's not just what's the trauma, what's the trauma that makes certain problems. You have to match the trauma to the person. And a big part of what you're matching to is that genetically based characteristic of how finely attuned is that, that empathic attunement and that compass.

So when you think about, just return to childhood. When you think about trauma in childhood, What can we say about the impact of child abuse on the development of a human being?

I think the impact of it is so disproportionately bad and hurtful compared to things that happen when we're not children. And I want to be very careful about how I'm saying that because people can, through their strength and resilience and human interconnectedness can overcome that. I don't mean to say that anyone who's experienced those things can't make it through it or over it. It. That part is not true. But it is true that the impact is so disproportionate to anything else that can happen because the brain is formulating. If we say psychology is like applied neurobiology and we look at both of those as different ends, even though there's a lot of gray in the middle, the neurobiology is changed. So just one example of a much greater salience of vigilance. Mechanisms of, mechanisms of self protection mechanisms that can make a person feel more fear and more insecurity and hide themselves away from the world and not trust the world. And I mean not trust the world even enough that oh, I'd like to have a better job and another one is here that I could take, but maybe it could be worse being afraid of that. There are all sorts of ways in which, in which the changes to those pathways impact someone. And that's just one of. We could bring trauma experts together that could talk about that for days. What is the impact upon the brain biology? So that then gets changed inside the person and from the perspective of those changes, the psychology on top of it changes. What do I think about myself? Do I think that I'm worthwhile even in my mid-20s after, you know, without formative traumas and a pretty strong sense of self and some achievements? There's a big trauma then with the death of my brother and I start questioning, am I cursed? Am I worth anything? I mean, I was 20 something years old and doing reasonably well at the time. You know, how does this impact a child of 6, 7, 10, 12 years old? Right? We're sending such powerful messages that then change conception of, of self and that negatively changed conception sits upon the negatively changed neurobiology. And I think if we really thought, hey, let's do the best we can just for humans in general, for the human race, for our species in general, is we would handle children and caring for children so much differently in terms of protection mechanisms, intervention mechanisms. How many times do you see where now there's been some tragedy and a child gets a little bit of support and they had some therapy that was provided by some insurance carrier they get once a week for 16 weeks or whatever. I mean, we should be wrapping our societal resources around children, but we don't use our resources. Well, I was just reading, it's a little bit of an aside, but about $3000-000000-00000 a year in cost to the US economy just from schizophrenia. And you think it costs a fraction. What do we actually put into caring for people who have schizophrenia? So first there's a moral imperative, but let's say we put that aside and we only care about the economy because there are Mechanisms of thinking that look at it that way, how could we not amend that? But we are so reckless with our resources and we're tripping ahead of ourselves that we don't think, oh, my goodness, there is no better place on God's earth for prevention than here, prevention in terms of human suffering. And also, where do people like that go? I mean, more often people like that go to a place of increased suffering, inability to take care of themselves or to be in supportive relationships. Okay, we know there's a higher prevalence of that, but we're also creating the pool of people through which the envy, the narcissism, the sociopathy, the destruction arises. So again, if we care about people, we would be so focused on that. If we don't care about other people and just ourselves or just economic costs, we would still be so focused. But, you know, we're not. And we tend to just kind of call it good because we don't see anything disastrous happening at the moment. And I think there's a societal negligence there to the shame, really, of all of us. When child abuse and the impact neurobiologically and psychologically is potentially the greatest cause of suffering directly and indirectly on the face of the planet.

How much does trauma of that kind and later in life affect your ability to love another human being? Say, inside a relationship, connect with another human being?

It can impact it a lot. And again, I want to say, can people overcome and be as loving to a partner or a child or anyone else? Yes. But we're talking across society. Right. How are we setting the odds? Right, we're setting the odds towards a higher sense of vigilance, a decreased sense of self confidence, an increased sense of vulnerability. Right. A decreased comfort, interacting with others. Right. What we're doing is we're pushing towards isolation and misery and depression and resentment. I mean, those factors push towards that, you know, and we know that the research is so strong that. That, you know, adverse childhood experiences, that these things that happen, the more, the worse, the more prolonged, the more that person is up against as they try and navigate life.

And I suppose one of the elements of intimacy like we were talking about is vulnerability. And maybe there's a. Is there a fear of being vulnerable, of being hurt again? Is that ultimately the barrier to intimacy?

Yeah. If you're taught a lesson that says the world is not safe and you're not good enough for someone to keep safe and you're not strong enough to keep yourself safe, that's a final common pathway of the vast majority of child abuse is Telling those lessons to be able, then how can that not change the lay of the land against openness, against the ability to rationally consider trust and mutuality and to protect oneself, but also take chances and, you know, do the things that we have to do to create the greatest happiness in our lives. We set the odds so much against that.

There's another pathway which I think is. Is really interesting because of. I've seen it in people, is this kind of ability to detach yourself from feeling any emotions, to like, protect yourself. It's almost like you're not quite there.

There's a word for it. It's isolation of affect. It's a defense mechanism.

Yeah. Isolation of affect.

Yeah.

Is that a common way, another common way to deal with trauma?

Well, isolation of affect can cut both ways. So if there's been a major trauma, let's say someone has seen something terrible and they're isolated from their affect and at one time it was thought, well, maybe that's good, right? They're not hysterical, they're not distraught. But we see that is not good, right? Because what needs to be beheld, processed, we need to get our arms around in some way, shape or form has just been separated off. So we know that is not good. Right. But isolation of affect can also serve us very well. When I think back to being an intern, a medical intern in the hospital, and you might have to go and pronounce someone dead with, you know, with hysterical family members. And then, you know, 10 minutes later, five minutes later, might be two minutes later, really, you know, you have to go to another room and you've got to maybe do some procedure that involves, you know, having your focus on. On a certain thing and making sure your hand movements are the right way or talking to a person in a way that is. That's very different than where you just came from. That's very hopeful. And. And so then you have to isolate affect of what's going on around you. And it happens not just in. It's just one example, but we have to do it in life so that we can put affect aside to process later or not feel the full weight of affect where we know the meaning. Like I knew the meaning of the tragedy of the person I just pronounced dead, but I want to separate that from myself because I'm also aware that it's not my tragedy so that I can then, okay, put that affect aside and go do the next thing that I have to do so that I think can cut both ways. Right.

But then you have to like, reattach it, understand that it's good to be close with emotion, even painful emotion, right? Like, because that's the human experience, right? It's, it's like, I feel like if you, if you build up a skill that you can detach yourself from emotion, I think that could become its own kind of. Yeah.

Addictive quality becomes too easy to do it and to reinforce. That's when people are suffering too much over too long a period of time. Then we're creatures of habit. And even though our brains are you talking about, our brains are sitting on the shoulders of the giant of the maybe thousand levels of emergence that come underneath of them, our brains are also work in very simple habit based ways. If you and I chose a word right now and said it 500 times, we would know it's just a silly experiment, but we'd both be saying it tonight, right? Because our brains are also creatures of habit. So if you over and over and over have to isolate yourself from affect and you develop those mechanisms, well, you develop those mechanisms and they don't go away any easier than if we said the word 500 times and decided to forget. We won't forget no matter what we decided.

So how do we find our way back? How do we overcome trauma? What are the different pathways?

The first thing, the very first thing is to acknowledge to ourselves and often to others, which might be one other person, it might be in words spoken, it might be written what the trauma has been. Because the lessons of trauma, the evil lessons of trauma, and I'll use, use the example of my own life, the lesson that told me that I was shameful, cursed and hopeless, right? It's a very evil lesson, right? But my brain will say it over and did say it over and over and over to me. And if that just sits inside, that's how trauma festers. That's how trauma hijacks our thoughts, our emotions. So being able to say to ourselves and to another like, this is what's happened, right?

Okay.

This is what's happened. We're built to massage words and to create meaning through words, right? Like we don't massage pictures, right? Images, we talk and massage meaning with words. So when I finally went to see a therapist and I, and I could say, you know, my brother, whatever words I would have said, like he killed himself and I, and I can't, I can't accept it or I can't imagine it, and I let it happen. So I had to say those things, right? So then I could begin to bring some sense of truth to it, and it was a long time ago, but the therapist probably said something like, okay, probably seize on you, let it happen. It's your fault, right? Because you got to get at those things so that one can begin to bring into focus, what does the trauma mean and what does it not mean? I mean, a classic example is the what would you say to someone else example. You'll say, well, how many times have I cry if I stop and think about it enough? Stop and talk to someone who is sexually assaulted through no fault of their own, who comes in and tells the story they've been telling themselves about how it's their fault, they should have walked home a different way, they should have dressed differently, they should have left earlier. I wrote about it in the book over and over and over. Now you have a person who, let's say you take a person who's intelligent, engaged in the world, who's capable of understanding lots and lots and lots of things, but doesn't understand that, right? If it were someone else, that person would understand in a moment. That's not that person's fault, right? So what you want to do is overcome the fact that the negative emotions, the hijacked emotion systems of trauma are telling that person a lie. And they're telling them so strongly and so awfully, so meanly that the person just takes it inside and starts to see it as true, right? So you begin to hold that up to the light of day. And again, one example could be, okay, so someone, the person who's coming in next has actually been through something similar, right? And can you stay and just tell her how it's her fault, right? And like, oh, my God, no, because I could never. Like, then they see, right? I mean, again, this is not always how you do it, but sometimes you can get a person to see, like, well, that would be the most horrible. How could you do that? Right? And the person can maybe come out, they're doing it to themselves. So, you know, you begin to put words in a structure and say, okay, let's look at what's going on inside of you. You don't have to be scared of anything you're thinking and feeling. In fact, the fear is in not exposing it to the light of day. That's where it gets the best of us. And now everything is different. And whether that involves use of medications for intrusive thoughts and depression, or there's no medicines needed, but it's all reframing whatever it may be that comes next, the whole world has changed. When the person has acknowledged what's happened, exposed it to themselves and to trusted others around them and begun to look at it it in some way other than the stuffed in an evil box place that the trauma initially puts us through, the reflexes it creates in us.

It's interesting that there's power to just saying it out loud, right? So first saying your perception of it out loud, then in that case that might be your fault and then working through out loud, working through that. But it may not be.

Any experienced therapist will tell you this, that every now and then it will happen that someone will come and they'll say something. Usually it's very early on in the process, they'll say something they've never said before and they immediately are in an entirely different place than they may have been for decades. And I can remember a person saying that a coach had raped him and just saying it. This was decades before and everything was different. I'm not saying everything is now perfect, but his life was in a different place as soon as he said it. He could see how dare, like he thought that person did that to this child. The child was me. He never thought it until he said it out loud because his mind was going over and over with why it was his fault, what he did to deserve it, how he kept going back. So it must be his fault. It was in it. As soon as he put words to it, he saw the truth of it it. And there's a bifurcation in the path of life then. And any therapist has, you know, stories like that which just shows the immense power that it can even be, that just uttering the words makes just a cascade of change all at once.

So saying those words to another human being, it makes you wonder what that compulsive loop that happens in our heads right until it's brought to the surface. It's so interesting.

Entirely non productive loops. And sometimes even if we put what would I say to another, Let me write it down, it can get rid of those loops in our brains. Any even thought of outward expression is the enemy of those internal persecutory, negative thought loops.

How do you find a good therapist? I tend to think of. Listen, I'm a fan of podcasts, I'm a fan of conversations. It feels like a real know. It's like finding a good friend or something. It feels like a difficult journey. Maybe I'm wrong in that, but it just feels like such a. It feels like a partnership, a journey together versus like some very simple clinical procedure.

Well, the first thing I would say is to change the entire paradigm, like most people, like, okay, I need a therapist. So people feel often like they're in a weakened position because they need need a therapist. Then therapists are rationed, right? I mean, how many insurance panels have lists a mile long of qualified therapists who could be on that insurance panel? But there's a certification process like this just make no sense, right? The state's already certified the person, but there's so many barriers to entry that now we're rationing this resource, which we should all stop and pause for a second and think like, like we're okay with that as a society. And by the way, everything else is like that too, when we're trying to get help for our health. So let's step back from that for a second. Now it's a resource that's not in great supply. And then a person begins to think, you know, essentially, I'll take what I can get. Like, I just got to get somebody. And I don't know enough to know anyway, right? And those are very disempowering thoughts as opposed to saying, look, I'm going to be an empowered consumer and I need to choose someone who gets over just some basic hurdles of what I think are reasonable human interaction, right? So, like, is the person making eye contact? Do they seem interested? Right? Like, these are basic points about any human interaction, including a therapist, right? Then you can say, okay, is there word of mouth? Anyone else who has something good? Nothing better than a word of mouth recommendation from someone you trust, right? Or anybody can have a good website. But you say, let me look at the website. What is it saying? If there is one, right? Does it, does it resonate with me or not? But after all of that, then you go to see the person with the idea that you're interviewing them. The idea that, yeah, I hope this person can help me. And if so, great, I'm with the program. But I'm thinking about it. Do I want this person? Do I feel heard? Do I feel cared for? Which doesn't mean is it easy, right? It might mean, is it hard? And I leave and I feel, like emotional for a couple of days, But I see that I'm facing new things. Things. No, this process of assessment so that one isn't settling for something that is formulaic over packaged. And I'm not trying to be overly critical of therapists. I mean, there are people everywhere who do their jobs well and people who don't do their jobs well. But most therapists are working in systems that push against doing the job well. Right. Because they're rationing care and there's an allotted number of sessions and there's enough such time before a person can return. And so often it's an uphill battle because we're trying to be helped within systems we've created and tolerate that are pushing against helping us.

Yeah, but you know, that interview process is tricky. I mean, if you're in a rough place mentally, just like with any kind of interview, it's hard not to think that a failed interaction, failed interview, there's. There's something wrong with you.

Sure, right.

There is an authority to a therapist, I think, where you think, like, they've got it all figured out.

Right.

And I'm a mess and therefore if there's something off, it's all my fault. All right. So it's a very tricky. And it's easy to then give up and then. Because it's like that step to try to get a therapist, the first, like, step to get help. Help. If I get therapists, like any kind of help, that's a big leap to take, especially when you're in a rough place.

I agree completely. We should not make people swim against such a strong current to get their needs met. I mean, we see this in such obvious places where you have an elderly homebound person who can't get their medicine because, oh, there's been some change and they didn't put the new number into the form or Lord knows what. I mean, it. It's incredible how we force people to swim against strong currents to get things that are just basic at times for their survival. And with that in mind, I don't have a lot of respect for where healthcare is at or where mental health is at. The field that I work in has accepted all sorts of aspects of how things go. Someone else controlling how, how long the interaction can go on, how the interaction is bounded, what can be said and done, what medicines can be prescribed. There's so many external controls in the systems we work in that we, and I say, me included, like all of us in the field.